Customer Service

The Register has a report on possibly the largest ever single-person phone bill, and the winner is…James Abdale, a Vodafone customer from Norwich, who got a bill for £588,198, and fifteen pence ($1,175,455 and two cents).
Abdale, who posted his saga on Vodafone’s forum, spent over two hours on the phone with customer service before being told that all managers had gone home and… Read More

Interesting approach to customer service you’ve got there, HP! Hot tipper Zack, who sent his still-under-warrantee HP laptop in to be serviced for a bad hinge, writes:
Well today I received a call from an HP Tech Support guy. I was informed
that liquid had been inside my keyboard and when they opened the computer to
diagnose it, the liquid spilled onto the motherboard causing damage. Read More

Dell, the baked goods manufacturer, knows that Americans don’t like calling tech support only to get “Pete,” whose name clearly Shoaib, who tells them to restart their computer for every single issue. Fine, Dell says, it’ll improve customer service—legitimate solutions on the other end of the line—but you’d better be ready to pay for it. The… Read More

I’m the resident customer service curmudgeon around CrunchGear. I’ve worked customer service as both a peon and manager, and I’ve been on the other side, so I know what’s reasonable to expect.
As I said a few weeks ago, if Circuit City destroys your car trying to install a stereo, they should fix it completely. Circuit wasn’t doing that, but reports are that… Read More

I’ve never had good luck with Dell’s customer service, it’s one reason why I just don’t recommend their products. One great example of this is a letter a young man named K sent to the Consumerist, detailing how Dell Support destroyed his old laptop while trying to troubleshoot his new one, and finally sent out a replacement.
Good on them, you say, for making good on that. Read More

Those sports at Amazon understand “new technologies don’t always work out as planned.” Or rather, they don’t work out as Toshiba planned. I have a feeling this is how Sony planned it all along. In any case, if you bought one of those bargain HD-DVD players after February 23rd, help yourself to $50 worth of stuff from Amazon. Personally, I’d be buying the Planet… Read More

I drive a Kia Spectra that I just love. I bought it brand new 2004 and one of the first things I did was have an iPod adapter kit installed for the car stereo. I’m an iPod guy, and I want to take my songs with me always. I took it to Circuit City and while the install was fast, they messed up the facing on my dashboard, so now it just sort of hangs there. They told me there was nothing… Read More

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We’re going to try to think like Creative here. Let’s say we, as Creative, insist that our drivers for our multimedia cards were Vista-ready. Let’s say they really weren’t, they were buggy drivers with missing features. Let’s say we had no real plans to fix this. We’re a large corporation with better things to do.
So… Read More

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The guys over at BGR are griping at Apple for an email sent to a customer under Steve Jobs’s name. At the heart of the issue is a MacBook Pro which sustained water damage. The owner was miffed that it would cost him $300 for Apple to look into repairing it, not knowing if it was possible or not. He emailed Steve about what he considered… Read More

Shortly after an — ahem — misunderstanding involving Microsoft’s Xbox tech support department, a gamer, and an autographed Xbox 360 case (you can read all about the original fiasco here), things seem to have been made right — by Bungie.
Bungie, makers of the wildly popular Halo series, sent the gamer a bunch of cool stuff to replace the signatures and drawing of… Read More

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So how exactly is it that Sony can have better customer service than NewEgg, the bastion of happy buyers? Consumerist has it from a customer who bought a PS3 from NewEgg that was pictured as including a copy of Spider-Man 3 on Blu-ray. When the package arrived, the movie was absent, and the packaging made no mention of the film being… Read More

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Now this is how you run a company. Daniel R. Hesse is the newly appointed CEO of Sprint, a company not known for its customer service skills. At the first operations meeting he oversaw, he noted customer service wasn’t on the agenda at all. He made it the first thing they discussed.
We’re hopeful Hesse can turn Sprint’s rep around. Read More

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A retailer actually giving a damn about its customers? It can’t be an American one, right?
No. It’s not.
Japanese corp Edion, which owns a bunch of electronic stores over there, will exchange customers’ now obsolete HD DVD players for Blu-ray players. The corp will accept Toshiba players for one from Sony, Panasonic or… Read More

The video is funny enough on its own, but if it’s real, then none of you Dell fans can talk to me about the great customer service of Dell.
Watch it. Laugh. Thank me later.
Video: Purported Dell Call Center Employee Calls Customer “Little Girl” [BB Gadgets] Read More

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Flickr’d
Microsoft, DRM and the non-working Xbox 360. It’s like a Tom Clancy novel.
A Kotaku patron, Kevin, has his Xbox 360 red ring of death on him last November. Fair enough, it happens. So he contacted Microsoft, which then arranged for his console to be repaired. A little while later a repaired Xbox 360 arrived in the mail. Read More

[photopress:raelyn_2.jpg,full,left]This is a tale of poor customer service and aggravated lawsuits and lost laptops, all things we love. Raelyn Campbell is suing Best Buy for $54 million after the electronics lost a laptop she’d brought in for repairs.
That seems very high, but Campbell believes that the money she’s asking for isn’t just about the lost laptop but rather for… Read More

About two weeks ago, a Comcast technician came to my house to set me up with the new TiVo interface for my two Motorola DVR boxes. After some initial trouble, things started working correctly and everything seemed normal. I put together a video of the new interface and called it “way better than the alternative Comcast DVR interface.”
Multiple online support sessions and one… Read More

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Yesterday, we got a note from our contact form from a reader about how Comcast was screwing his grandpa out of watching the Superbowl. Sic throughout:
I could care less about football. My grandfather in Boca Raton Florida
however loves it. He unfortunately has comcast which has been in and out of
service three times now during the super bowl, the… Read More

Fortunately and unfortunately us tech journos get pretty good technical support. We make a call to someone in company PR, they come and help us, and we rarely go through the hoops normal consumers face when they have a bum PC or printer (incidentally, I’m happy to escalate problems with products to the proper folks for CG readers. I’ve done it before on WWR for people who had… Read More

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I’m all about “Takin’ it to the top” to get your stuff fixed. If I have a problem with customer service, I have no compunction against asking for a supervisor. Jon, writing to Consumerist, had no scruples about this either. When his Xbox 360 started acting up, he wrote to Kathleen Hogan, VP of Customer Service, as… Read More